Professor Linda Colley is a distinguished historian. In her Britons, published in 1992, she proved that good, imaginative professional history could attract a wide public. Captives is a more complex book that demands close reading, as she unravels the ambiguities that challenge customary certainties of imperial history.

The empire celebrated at Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee was 'reimagined as inexorable and inevitable'. No one could have imagined this in the period she examines from 1600 to 1850. Time and time again, it was an empire challenged by its 'smallness', the incapacity of a small island to provide the manpower to run an empire. It was, as a perceptive analyst wrote in the early 1800s, an empire planted in a flowerpot.

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